We were trying to take the high road with this racecar thing, not thump our chests too hard about the way our Ford 302-powered Volvo 244 was going to annihilate the competition at Altamont... but then the gentleman in the photo above, Jason Torchinsky of Team Make:Way, decided to throw down the gauntlet with this taunting email:

So let's talk about Make:Way's car. It's a 1993 Ford Escort; they claim that they were reduced to buying one of the weakest, most shoddily-built vehicles ever to creep out of Dearborn under its own so-called power because "nobody sells anything interesting AND running for $500 or less." This speaks volumes about their lack of experience with cheap car shopping. Why, you can get V12 Jaguars for $500!

Looking at the top teams of the 24 Hours of LeMons race last weekend, we thought it was great that…
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You see, Volvos are all about the safety. Because of that, they have massive aluminum battering rams for bumpers. Here's our car. Lesser cars will bounce off these bumpers like ping-pong balls off the side of a Big Boy locomotive.

And what happens when you get into a paint-trading situation with a vast hunk of Detroit iron, like f'r'example the Size Matters Fury? Well, if you're driving a Göteborg brick, you might get an unsightly dent or two... but a freakin' Escort will disintegrate like a popsicle-stick tower having a piano dropped onto it from ten stories up! We won't get into the terrible things that take place when a front-wheel-drive car takes a hard shot to a front wheel (which occurs about every 17 seconds at Altamont), because Team Make:Way will be too busy trying to get out of the way of the faster cars (i.e., damn near all of them) to worry about that!